


if i let the ground swallow me whole (i'd be fine because i know how to be alone)

by CordeliaRose



Series: Wolves [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Corey & Theo is the brotp this world needs, Good Theo Raeken, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Introspection, Is there a tag for that?, M/M, Redemption, Sort of? - Freeform, Theo & Corey Friendship, Thiam, and it's there, and talking about past traumas, bros being bros and visiting graves together, but please be careful and be safe rather than sorry!, but this is mostly a Theo & Corey friendship fic, graves, i'm making the tag for that, it's mentioned - Freeform, like way too much, or at least trying to be good theo raeken because it doesn't happen overnight, wow what a selection of tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27272437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CordeliaRose/pseuds/CordeliaRose
Summary: Early one Saturday morning, Corey walks from his own house to the Geyer-Dunbar-Raeken's (as Liam has taken to calling it) and knocks politely on the front door. He then immediately opens the door and walks straight in, rather less politely.[[[]]]Or, Corey takes Theo to the woods and they talk about emotions and stuff.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: Wolves [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991311
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	if i let the ground swallow me whole (i'd be fine because i know how to be alone)

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been a while but I’m hyperfixating on Teen Wolf again and this was the first out of about ten separate works to get finished so let’s party
> 
> I imagined this as a sequel to you better turn the light on, but I guess it could make sense outside of that too? This isn’t really Thiam based, but it’s definitely mentioned and written with it in mind; this is a Theo-Corey friendship/Theo redemption fic that’s been floating around the old noggin for a while and I finally vomited it onto a word document. 
> 
> Take the trash & enjoy it, please and thank you

Early one Saturday morning, Corey walks from his own house to the Geyer-Dunbar- Raeken's (as Liam has taken to calling it ) and knocks politely on the front door. He then immediately opens the door and walks straight in, rather less politely.

Mrs Geyer, emptying the dishwasher, doesn’t seem to mind – she's probably used to various members of the pack wandering in and out of her house by now, and at least Corey isn’t yelling maniacally like Stiles or covered in dirt and blood like Malia. She just offers him a drink and says that Liam’s still asleep if he’s come over for lacrosse practice.

Theo is not asleep. He always wakes up about six, no matter the amount or quality of sleep he’s had, thanks to the rigid schedule of the Dread Doctors’ upbringing, but on weekends he likes to stay in bed and read for a few hours. Today’s book is a recommendation from Liam – apparently, it’s a thrilling read, but so far Theo hasn’t found anything of particular note in the autobiography of Auguste  Mustel , father of the modern glockenspiel.  So he hears quite clearly when Corey says, “It’s alright, I came to see Theo, actually.”

Mrs Geyer, sans supernaturally enhanced hearing, probably doesn’t hear the solid  thunk that is Theo falling out of his bed in surprise. Corey probably does, but Theo figures he can live with that that embarrassment considering he has genuinely traumatized Corey for life, so he just picks himself off the floor and hurries to find some clothes.

“I think he’s still in his room,” Mrs Geyer is saying as he pulls on a pair of jeans, struggling  futilely and bemusedly for a few seconds until he  realises he has them upside-down and corrects his mistake. “But he’s probably awake, feel free to go on up, sweetie.”

Liam calls it the Corey effect. He says it like it’s some kind of insidious phenomenon, hissing darkly to anyone who will listen about how he’s like a ray of sunshine and everyone suddenly snaps out of their bad moods as soon as he appears, even if they haven’t had their morning coffee yet or just been shot full of wolfsbane. (Theo had laughed at those two descriptions being placed on an equal pedestal the first time he’d heard it, but then a few weeks later he encountered a caffeine-free Melissa on an early shift at the hospital and realised that she was in fact more terrifying than any time he’d dealt with an injured werewolf.) In any case, it seems to have worked on Mrs Geyer, who Theo had heard previously puttering around muttering darkly about grout for half an hour. She’ll probably make pancakes for breakfast now, score.

Theo opens the door so Corey doesn’t have to knock, then thinks maybe he should pretend that he wasn’t  eavesdropping and shuts it again. Then he opens it again because Corey will have been expecting him to listen in, the entire pack does it shamelessly, and perhaps Theo just likes to have his bedroom door open anyway? With that settled, he yanks a random shirt that’s dangling from the back of his desk chair, but the scent hits him before he can tug it on. It’s Liam’s shirt, and it smells like Liam, and instinctively he brings it to his face and inhales. The churning in his stomach calms some, which is both a relief and an annoyance because he hadn’t even realised his stomach was churning until then.

When he looks up, Corey is watching him reverently sniff dirty laundry with a mildly judgemental expression. There’s no way back from that but to own it, really, so he announces, “It’s Liam’s,” and lets Corey figure out in his own time that Theo wasn’t being dirty and gross, he was being soppy and gross, thank you very much, and then Corey will have no place to judge because he and Mason seem to spend half of their time together trying to occupy the same molecules of space.

He finds his own discarded shirt from where Liam had flung it last night (the  Geyers went on a date to a restaurant so Liam and Theo went on a date to Theo’s room) and is pleased when it’s mostly intact, only one small hole from a claw poked through. A few weeks ago, they’d had to go out to buy some basic T-shirts in bulk because nearly all of his tops had been shredded by the overzealous horny ball of rage he calls his boyfriend. “You need me for something?”

“I’d like you for something,” Corey replies, leaning against the doorframe like it’s a lifeline. Whether that’s just general anxiety, anxiety relating to being in Theo’s presence, or Theo’s abs that have made him weak at the knees isn’t clear, but Theo keeps a careful distance away while they talk in case it’s either of  the latter.

“Just me? Not Liam, not Mason?” Being alone with Corey is an intimidating idea, more because of their shared history than the chameleon himself, and Theo hides the flash of panic he knows passes over his face by pulling the shirt on. There, that should lessen the chances of ab-induced death significantly.

Corey shakes his head. “It’s-” He glances down at his feet. “It’s personal. To both of us,” he mumbles. His fingers start tapping on the wall, one-two-three, one-two-three. Whatever it is, Theo gets the sense it’s more than personal. Corey plays his cards close to his chest; everything is personal to him, so this is something intimate, almost sacred. Theo has no idea why he’s choosing to desecrate it by sharing it with him, but he’s curious.

“Well, I’m game,” Theo says, smoothing his signature cocky smile into place. He’s on what could be called a self-improvement kick lately, and it’s been going reasonably smoothly – to be fair, it’s not hard to be a better person than the uncaring murderer he was, but he’s still having to accept some hard truths. One of them is that his arrogance is not entirely faked. He is, in fact, to borrow Liam’s words – a supercilious bastard sometimes, but he’s accepted that. It’s comforting to be able to fall back on something that Old Theo relied on to get through life and know that it’s still a part of New Theo, too. And as far as personality traits go, it’s miles above homicidal, so he’ll take it.

It seems to settle Corey in much the same way, his own hesitant smile flickering onto his face. It’s not ideal, per se, that Theo’s more caustic attitudes are what Corey finds comforting and familiar, but Theo figures it’s all a learning curve. Nobody in life isn’t a little fucked up, after all, and if some of your trauma is that your former-sort-of-alpha treated you like shit before coming back from the sort-of-dead and now treats you not like shit, then Theo sure as fuck has no place to judge. Especially considering he is that former-sort-of-alpha. He hasn’t even worked out half of his traumas yet, which is probably an important step in resolving them.

“It’s, um. It’s at the preserve. Maybe...six miles.  So we could walk? Or drive and then walk?”

Sensing Corey’s nervous energy – which isn’t so much a testament to Theo’s supernatural abilities to smell  chemo signals as it is to the fact that it’s so thick it’s practically plastering the walls – he says, “A walk would be nice.”

* * *

The first mile of their journey takes them through Liam’s neighbourhood, which  at this time is mostly deserted. They encounter a couple of dog walkers – the dogs smelling something in Theo that they recognise and straining to say hello – and a jogger, and an elderly woman refilling bird feeders in her front yard, but aside from polite ‘good  morning’s to the dog walkers and ‘what a good  boy’s to the dogs, the time passes in silence. There’s some unspoken agreement between them that neither of them  are quite ready to bring up the past yet, so any topics that could be even vaguely perceived as ‘serious’ are so far off the table they’re underground. But, progress from the last time they were together, this silence is almost comfortable, rather than distinctly  murderous .

Out of the house-lined streets and cul-de-sacs and on the wooded paths to the preserve, Corey stammers out a few meaningless syllables before he manages, “Your hair looks good like that. Long, I mean.”

“Oh, thanks.” Theo reaches up automatically to tug at it where it curls onto his neck. It’s not  as long as Liam’s ridiculous mane of hair, but he should probably get it trimmed before it strays into that territory. “I think it suits my ears better.”

Corey splutters, clearly unprepared. “Ear - ears?”

“Yeah, I have a lot of unresolved ear trauma,” Theo says dispassionately. He recently discovered that New Theo enjoys deadpan humour to a maybe worrying extent. It turns out that Liam does not, which makes it even better, and contributes to roughly a quarter of daily joy. And now it seems Corey is a fan, because he’s grinning widely. “I ended up growing into them, but when I was a  kid they were just huge. I could have used them to take flight.” He cups his hands behind his ears to give a scale for how astronomically enormous they used to be.

“So now you have ear trauma?”

“What can I  say, that kind of thing sticks with you.”

Corey looks away when he starts to openly laugh, a small tic that Theo had noticed before. Old Theo hadn’t really cared any which way. New Theo think it’s endearing. “I used to be scared of you,” he confesses a few minutes later, through slightly hysterical giggles. “I used to be scared of the guy with ear trauma.” He pronounces  _ ear trauma _ in the style that one might say  _ incest _ or  _ cannibalism _ .

The tension they’ve been holding aloft is smashed and crunched underfoot when they both laugh. He wasn’t aware that he was finding it difficult to breathe before, but now Theo can feel his lungs expanding a little more easily, the air crisp and clean. Corey is walking with a little more bounce, shoulders no longer hunched from hands shoved in pockets.

Conversation comes easy after that, ranging from Theo’s plans for coming back to school to graduate to their mutual dislike of a popular artist. None of it feels forced.

Somewhere around mile three – halfway, Corey says, and when Theo asks where exactly in the preserve  are they  going he kind of shrugs helplessly and says somewhere on the east side – the Sheriff pulls up alongside them, blurts his sirens to alert them to his presence, laughs at them when they both nearly eat shit from the shock, then rolls down his window to ask if they need a ride. 

“We’re good with walking, thank you,” Corey says, reverting to the stiff, formal mode he seems to get around every single adult other than Melissa. “It’s very kind of you to offer though, Sheriff.”

“Alright,” the Sheriff says easily, “be careful, you two. And it’s Noah, not Sheriff.”

“Yes, Sheriff,” Corey says. Through remarkable self-restraint, there’s only the hint of a smug smile on his lips.

“Thanks, Sheriff,” Theo echoes in the same tone, not to be jokingly irreverent but because he’s too terrified to even think of referring to him by his first name.

The Sheriff rolls his eyes good-naturedly, not bothered by the small display of cheek when he’s dealt with Stiles for almost two  decades, and drives off with a cheery wave. Theo watches the car roll away with mingled dread and relief poking at his senses, hissing at him that everything that just happened was wrong. 

Like he can read Theo’s mind, Corey says quietly, “There’s only one person who hasn’t  forgiven you.” The moment’s poignancy might have carried over if he hadn’t added, “It’s not the Sheriff. It’s you. Yourself,” clearly worried that his words would have been misinterpreted.

Well, Corey can apparently see right into his soul – or he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve now that he can’t  pretend he doesn’t have one, so he might as well just dive into that can of worms. “Maybe there’s a reason for that. I’m the only one who knows everything that I did.”

Corey’s response to that – sweet, innocent, kind Corey, literal ray of sunshine, Corey who went to a library clean-up because the only way he could get rid of his own bad feelings was to make others feel good, Corey who brings Melissa dinner whenever he can, Corey who takes flowers to his grandmother’s grave every Sunday – Corey's response to his statement is to roll his eyes and scoff, like it’s the most ridiculous, idiotic thing he’s ever heard. Like there’s no way that Theo wouldn’t deserve absolution, like he could even imagine the depths of depravity that Theo has scraped himself against. “You don’t have the monopoly on doing bad things, Theo. Everyone’s done bad things.” As far as strategies go, it’s an interesting one – Theo's never been told to stop being so self-centred about being a bad person before, certainly, but maybe the double admonishment will cancel itself out. “People do bad things for good reasons, and good things for bad reasons, and everything in between, and-” he throws his arms up in the air like he’s swatting away moral quandaries - “I don’t understand ethics or morals, not really, but I know that the world isn’t black and white, so why should anything else be?”

That, admittedly, has Theo stumped for a while. He’s tempted to say that things such as mass murder are generally regarded in a  fairly black-and-white kind of way, but when he’d posed that same statement to Liam the answer had been “the pack collectively slaughtered at least thirty hunters last year, things stop having meaning when you’re supernatural”.

“Half the pack-” Corey starts abruptly, cuts himself off just as abruptly, then starts again, “look, I wasn’t there so I don’t know the full story, but there are others who did worse and suffered less than you, and they’re now part of the pack. Scott said that himself, and I know that he feels terrible for what he did, but he doesn’t know how to say that without seeming like he’s pitying you and he thinks you’d hate that, so. He just invites you to pack nights and tries to make you feel welcome.” He takes in a breath like he just sprinted a marathon.

Theo feels his brow wrinkling. “Is that what he’s been trying to do?” Awkward one-armed hugs and ‘hey do you want to pick the movie tonight?’ haven’t really communicated that to him, especially when everyone else in the pack gets full, double-armed hugs and one-on-one talks about feelings every other hour. But now he realises that maybe this was Scott being considerate, toning his affection down to a level he thought Theo would be comfortable with. It feels like warm honey binding his chest together, simultaneously sweet and comforting while suffocating and unfamiliar.

“He found out I liked  pasta and brought me pasta bakes every night for two weeks,” Corey informs him dryly. “Mason told him I didn’t like hugs and game nights, so he brought me pasta instead. For two weeks. If he can’t hug you, he’ll do something weird.”

“You like hugs and game nights,” Theo says, because that’s easier to focus on than Scott’s apparent pasta fetish. Lydia in particular likes to throw her arms around Corey as soon as she sees him – she's semi-adopted him at this point – and more than one game night has ended with several victories under Corey’s belt.

“I do now. Just...give it some time.”

“Give it some time and I’ll be almost like a real boy,” Theo mutters sourly under his breath. Corey glances at him sharply but doesn’t raise the topic, and the walk becomes silent once more.

The woods next to them are getting steadily noisier as they come closer to the heart of the preserve, birdsong piercing through the air and leaves rustling as small wildlife skitters about. Theo lets his eyes drift closed, irises glowing gold underneath the lids to let his wolf guide his feet.

It’s peaceful for a few minutes, then -

"You're not a psychopath," says Corey, apropos of nothing. Theo’s eyes snap open but he keeps his gaze straight ahead, scared of what they might betray. "You have emotions, you care about people. You always did, you just pushed it down. Or didn’t even realise you could." He pauses, bites his lip and looks at the trees they’re strolling past with forced nonchalance. “Or weren’t allowed to.”

  


"Just add it to the list,” Theo mutters, “things I failed at: number one, being a psychopath.”

  


Corey, for whatever reason, is beaming, like they’re talking about puppies or Winona Ryder (Liam made him watch Heathers and now he’s in love). "Not for the first time," he says lightly, too lightly for what he's referencing, "I'm glad you failed."

  


Theo mulls for a few seconds. He can't smell any resentment or bitterness or anything other than gentle amusement and a wary affection, so it’s probably safe to proceed. Corey is nowhere near manipulative enough to alter his chemo-signals so he can lull someone into a false sense of security, despite Old Theo’s best efforts. "Why do you know how to diagnose psychopaths?"

  


"Me and Mason's mum watch a lot of true crime documentaries.” Theo can’t imagine Mason and Corey being around each other and paying attention to anything else, so he surmises that Corey spends a lot of time at the Hewitt household without his boyfriend there. New Theo likes this. He also likes how casually Corey says it, like it’s no longer a big deal because it’s just something that happens. "We watched one a little while ago and the guy it was focused on, he reminded me of you. Before," he adds quickly, by which Theo assumes he means before Hell, before ghost riders, before Monroe's cult, before. Well. Before Theo realised that he was only playing at being human.

  


"How did he remind me of you? Charming facade hiding the true  power-hungry megalomania?"

  


Corey snorts, so quickly that it’s probably involuntary. Then he says slowly, a bit quieter than before, like he's testing the waters, "No, this guy wasn't charming."

  


Theo’s legs are so surprised that they promptly stop moving; Corey doesn’t realise immediately and ends up a few steps ahead of him before he realises and comes to a standstill too, looking back with a carefully blank expression, not scared but not amused either, waiting for Theo's reaction. 

  


"I think that's the first time I've heard you joke," Theo says by way of honest explanation for his sudden halt. He doesn't add on the next thought that had immediately popped up, a faint memory of  _ she has a hole in her head, that's not a good look for anyone _ because that wasn't so much a joke as a desperate grasp for any kind of relief in a deeply fucked up situation. 

  


Corey waits for him to start walking again, for him to catch up, before he falls into the same pace and purposefully tips his weight to nudge Theo's shoulder feather-light. The silence is comfortable, but Theo’s curious now despite himself. He generally tries to avoid introspection and psychoanalysis like the  plague but being compared to this non-charming non-psychopath has piqued his interest. "Don't leave me hanging, what do me and this guy have in common?" 

  


The answer comes so quickly that Corey must have been waiting for him to ask. "Manipulated," and it takes Theo a moment before he understands that Corey did mean that, and not  _ manipulative _ , "tortured, abused to the point that he couldn't understand why being kind mattered."

  


Theo swallows, because the supernatural psychiatrist (Lucy, she's a  Caladrius – mythology describes them as white birds that absorb sickness to heal a person and then fly to the sun to allow the illness to be burnt, but apparently in reality they just have an advanced nurturing and medical instinct) has helped him realise much of the same about himself. He briefly thinks of that meme Liam sent to the pack's group chat one time, something about "I'm in this photo and I don't like it", and bites his lip to stop from smiling so he doesn't look like even more of a weirdo as Corey continues.

  


"And he was super intelligent. Like, several years ahead of everyone else as a kid.  So he got bored of life, and apparently that's dangerous, because..." Corey kind of gestures uselessly, not wanting to  say 'because then you turn into a ruthless killing machine just to try and get some excitement, exploiting others to do your will is good enough at first but then you need more and more like a drug addict just to reach that same high until nothing does reach it and you're left perpetually numb but repeating the same awful actions in the hope that the feelings will return'. Or words to that effect.

  


"Clearly I wasn't that clever, or I wouldn't have let the Dread Doctors convince me to kill my own sister," he mumbles without really meaning to. He loved  _ Star Wars _ and devoured comic books, but he still remembers watching Tara struggling to breathe and thinking  _ is this worth being a superhero? _

In his peripheral vision Corey's head turns sharply away from him. His scent curls at the edges, festering into anger, and Theo waits for whatever barb is deservedly heading his way.

  


"You know how I lost my virginity?" is what Corey says though, suddenly and by all accounts randomly. He doesn't wait for Theo's answer, which would have been a morbidly curious  _ no _ . "I was fifteen and at a club, and a guy who was definitely way older than me told me I was special." 

  


"And nobody had ever said that before?" Theo guesses. It’s not a hard conclusion to reach, even with the minimal knowledge he has of Corey’s home life. He preens like a peacock whenever anyone pays him a compliment about anything.

  


“Nobody had ever said that before,” Corey confirms. “My parents never wanted me, my grandma loved me but I just don’t think it ever occurred to her to say anything like that, I’ve never been the teachers’ favourite...so I let a way older guy fuck me, and then when he told me he would call me, I believed him, and I waited for that call for a week before I realised."

  


"That guy was a piece of shit," Theo says quietly after a few seconds have passed. Corey's scent is still wavering on the borders of anger but it’s not quite as acrid anymore, the feelings smoothing themselves out and settling like dust.

  


"He was," Corey agrees, "and it was a similar kind of thing when you brought us all back as chimeras. Being supernatural and being literally raised from the dead – it's hard not to feel special about something like that. That’s why I let you convince me to come join you."

  


Theo hides the guilt under a layer of carefully steady heartbeats and aching pain in his chest. Old Theo never had to think about doing that, it was the default state. New Theo finds it difficult. "You left in the end."  _ Thank whatever gods there are that you did.  _ “Before I could...”  _ kill you again. _

  


"Because Mason made me feel even more special. Special for being Corey, not a chimera." The words aren't a dig at him, Theo knows, but the soft loving smile on the other boy's face sure feels like a taunt of something he'll never have. Not because he doesn’t feel the same way about Liam, but because – because Liam will never know him. Not truly. Not down to the darkness that still stirs in the pit of his soul. He’ll never know because Theo will never let him know, but that means that Liam will never truly love all of him, and that stings like venom whenever he thinks about it. He tries not to whenever possible.

  


"The point is..." Corey takes in a deep breath, steeling himself for what is probably a hard truth for both of them, "we don’t just want to feel special. We need to feel special. And if we don’t have anyone who loves us enough to tell us that we are, we’ll overlook just about any red flag or warning sign for the chance to prove that we can be. And by that point you’re so desperate that special doesn’t have to mean good. It just has to mean that you’re not like anybody else.”

There's a dam in Theo's brain somewhere that Corey's words have just unblocked, and it feels like his mind is being flooded with memories and darkness and a childhood that he doesn’t feel justified in complaining about, because he certainly wasn’t abused by his  parents, but he doesn’t think he was loved either. But the sun is shining through the trees onto them and Corey, noticing Theo's unexpected hesitation again, is gently pushing his upper arm against his own, enough to ground but not too much to crowd, so the flood settles into a trickle soon enough and he can wipe the wetness from his face while Corey takes great interest in a stone underfoot.

“Sorry,” Theo finds himself saying, “the ear trauma just got too much for a second.”

He wholly deserves it when Corey throws that same stone at him.

* * *

“Here we are,” Corey announces. 

As far as Theo can see, it’s just another part of the forest.  It’s beautiful, sure, mottled sunlight beaming through the dancing leaves above them, and the mostly even dirt beneath them is dusted with small branches and blooming wildflowers, but it’s just the same as the mile they’ve already trekked through. “It’s nice here,” he offers lamely. He glances around to see if he’s missed something obvious, like the Fountain of Youth or maybe the Trojan Horse, but nothing’s standing out.

“You see that tree?” Corey’s pointing at an oak tree, the trunk wider than both of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, bark gnarled and warped with knots the size of their heads. Theo’s not exactly a tree expert, but he guesses it’s at least a couple of centuries old. Maybe he could be a tree expert. How hard can dendrochronology be?

“It was our favourite tree. We used to come here a lot.”

Theo has the distinct sinking feeling that he knows who ‘we’ is.

“It’s stupid, having a favourite tree,” Corey continues, smiling wistfully with a twist of pain, “but it was so good to climb. You could get right to the top and sit there for hours, and if the sky was clear the moon would shine right on you.”

“Josh and Tracey?” His voice is barely a whisper, scratched out of his throat and sucker-punched into the air. He doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t want the confirmation, but he has to know.

Corey nods, still gazing at the tree.

Nausea slams into him like a bullet. It fragments and worms its way into his organs, into his lungs and stomach and spinal cord, leaking emotional devastation wherever it splinters. His entire body feels like a bomb, nerves transmitting raw agony to each other and veins transporting burning ice to deposit all over his skin. His knees buckle and he collapses.

Too many emotions to pick them out, growing thick and wild like a bramble bush, thorns skewering his stolen heart as they curl around the muscle.

Corey is either entirely oblivious to his plight or entirely aware of it, because he carries gamely on. “We would just chat about life. Nothing to do with the whole chimera weirdness or living in the sewers.” The thorns just keep on growing. “It was nice. Peaceful. So this, is, uh. Where I buried them.”

The world has just fragmented into so many millions of pieces that it’s never going to come back together again, atoms floating aimlessly like dust the dust incinerating his lungs - 

Acute barbed pain over the left side of his face. Corey, looking equally perplexed about punching Theo in the face, blurs into his line of sight. “Put me back,” Theo croaks. He shouldn’t get to live when - “Put me back, put me back, I can’t-” he killed them  _ he killed them _ he’s choking on the guilt that he keeps squashed down and hidden under layers and layers of lies and make-believe and  _ I don’t feel anything _ .

“Back?” Corey repeats, sinking to his knees. “Back to – oh. Theo, no.  _ No _ .” 

The cruel irony of striving to be good is that you inevitably wind up feeling bad. Culpability, responsibility, all that, they all come back to bite you in the ass eventually. It was so much easier to be bad and feel good about it. This – whatever this mess of fermenting heartache swirling inside of him is – cannot be lived with. If this is the price of being good, give Theo a coupon or let him die.

“Theo, listen to me,” Corey is saying, approximately a thousand miles away. “You’re not going back. You don’t deserve that, and we all know it. You know it too, you just won’t let yourself know it.”

Life isn’t fair, is what people say. Neither is death, or Theo would be decomposing six feet under before he ever got the chance to hurt anyone. And especially before he got the chance to realise his own sins and be flayed by his own guilt.

“I don’t-” His own body prevents him from finishing the sentence, windpipe crushing into itself.  _ I don’t know that _ , is what his mouth would have vomited out, but  _ I don’t deserve to live _ ,  _ I don’t know how to breathe _ ,  _ I don’t know _ seem to weigh down the air around him just as much.

“I don’t know how to – okay. Okay,” Corey mutters, and then he shifts until he’s almost behind Theo, and embraces him. It’s not quite a hug – it's more like a boa constrictor with their hapless prey, but like he’s been injected with some kind of drug the anxiety begins to retract back into its cave, a barely noticeable retreat but a surrender all the same. “Pressure releases endorphins, I don’t know why, but it’s meant to help, and you haven’t like, bitten me yet, so I think it probably is helping.”

Corey keeps talking but Theo just lets the words string together into mindless sounds, an unfocused melody to set the rhythm of his breathing to. Amazingly, it seems to be working. Who would have thought  that a technique used by millions of people worldwide would be so effective?

Corey, for his part, stays clinging to his back like an oversized koala. It’s not a position that Theo can truthfully say he’d ever imagined the two of them would be in, or that he’d be in with anyone, for that matter. Being aggressively spooned in the middle of the woods next to the graves of his victims isn’t how much people spend their Saturday mornings, or at least Theo thinks. He’s still figuring out how to be a normal  person; this could be something he hasn’t learnt about yet.

When his breathing is knocked down a few gears, from ‘barely’ to ‘laboured’, Corey releases him from his hug of death, and scoots round so they’re face-to-face instead. “You’re so messed up,” he says bluntly, rocking back on his heels. His hand is wavering in the air between them before he clamps it down on Theo’s shoulder. Apparently his panic has been downgraded from needing full-body pressure to just shoulder area pressure. “But I think – I think you won’t be, one day.”

“Is that enough?” Enough for what, precisely, Theo couldn’t say with a knife pressed to his throat. It feels like there is one anyway, pressing against his carotid artery, waiting to pounce when he makes one small wrong move.

“It is,” Corey says softly, “because it has to be.” Then, in a tone of voice that makes Theo think this is something Corey says to himself often, “One day you might not hate yourself, and that’s a pretty great aspiration to have. And that’s enough.”

“Enough,” Theo echoes, trying to convince his psyche. His chest loosens ever so slightly at the words, sighing its approval of the idea. “Tracey - and Josh – if they were here...” He trails off, unable to remember where he was planning to go with that train of thought.

“They’d probably punch you. Like, a lot,” Corey says matter-of-factly.

The last tendrils of anxiety dissipate with his laughter. “Yeah, they would,” he agrees, and he would totally deserve it.

“Then they’d tell you to stop being such a self-pitying idiot, and get on with your life.”

“You don’t know that.” Which is a lie. Theo didn’t know either of them half as well as Corey did, but he still knows that is absolutely what would happen. “They’d have every right to hold a grudge.”

“Josh cried at  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ and Tracey’s favourite song was  _ At Last _ by Etta James. They’re the forgiving type.” 

Which is another way of saying, they’re good people. Not like you.

“Some people can’t be absolved, Corey.” Suddenly the overwhelming anxiety has been replaced with seething anger and a red-hot need for people to understand just how awful he really is. “What I did...I killed people. Directly, indirectly, I killed people, and I  _ enjoyed _ it.  However much you think someone has changed, there are some things that just can’t be forgiven.”

“Everyone deserves a redemption arc, Theo.”

_ God, why is Corey – why does Corey back down so quickly on such small trivial issues but stick up for himself over issues like this? Pick a side, Corey, be spineless or be  _ _ spineful _ . “How does someone come back from the things that I did?”

Corey purses his lips while he thinks. Theo appreciates it – Liam's instant but mindless reassurances that he’s a good person have their place, but a considered answer from someone who has more reason than most to hate him is what he needs.

“Do you remember,” Corey says slowly, “the flamethrower incident?”

Theo narrows his eyes. Yes, he does, all too clearly, but he’s not sure how it relates to his morality. “I remember walking into a room on fire and having to put it out before the Doctors noticed. And then confiscate the flamethrower from Josh.”

“Exactly,” Corey says softly. “I was convinced you’d tell them, or get us into trouble somehow, or punish us yourself. But you just dealt with it and left.”

“I think that pales in comparison to everything else I put you through,” Theo can’t help but point out. Kidnapping, experimenting on, killing and then reviving only to torture someone doesn’t equate to not tattling one time.

Corey frowns at him, like he’s deliberately being obtuse. “You didn’t have to be what anybody was expecting you to be,” he explains slowly. “There was nobody watching you to make sure you did the right thing. You could just...be. And you did. You were just Theo, and you – well, you didn’t laugh about it or make jokes or whatever, but you weren’t cruel about it either.”

Oh. That’s an interesting way of looking at it, and infinitely kinder than Theo’s own assumption that he just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. He hadn’t quite gotten around to  retrospecting that particular incident yet, but he’ll keep that thought tucked away for when he does. “I think I’d have to do a little more to make it up to them. I – I used them, I killed them, and then I left them in the sewers to rot.”

“ So did everyone else.”

Scientific journals have yet to publish anything about it, but there is a correlation between genetic chimerism and neglectful parents that Theo noticed long ago, when the Doctors began their experiments and sent him out as scout. He has various theories – the cost of medical bills leads to parents resenting their children, perhaps – but the long and short of it is that the majority of teenagers – kids, really – that he abducted and gifted to his own surrogate parents were never even reported as missing. Sure, people would notice – schools especially, if they weren’t a loner then maybe some friends would kick up a fuss – but the parents wouldn’t bother with filing a police report. On the rare occasions that they did, the leads would go cold within days and the names would be forgotten along with thousands of others across the country. “You didn’t.”

“They should have had a proper funeral.” Corey’s hand tightens, almost imperceptibly so, around his shoulder. “I wanted them to, but I couldn’t explain how they died or how I found them to anyone.”

“They’re still missing, officially?”

“Assumed runaways.” 

Theo looks at the bitter set of Corey’s mouth, the harsh glaze to his eyes, and suddenly his whole being  _ aches _ . For Corey and for the first semblance of family he ever had, fucked up as it may have  been; for all the lives he swiped from the world, for all the suffering he enjoyed, for all the potential he cheated away.

This time the horror isn’t suffocating. It’s numb.

And he knows what he has to do.

Quivering legs barely support him as he fights his way towards the tree. His body senses the barrier he shouldn’t cross instinctively, pulling him up to an unsteady halt before he can desecrate the ground where they lay. He drops to his knees before the graves and strips his soul bare in penance, knowing it still isn’t enough, it will never be enough, but it will be because it has to be.

* * *

“Does anybody else know about this?” Tears have dried tacky over his face. He could wash them off, but the pull at his skin brings its own brand of peculiar solace. It feels human.

Corey shakes his head. “Nobody else ever bothered to get to know them.” He’s been marginally chirpier on their return journey, secret no longer trussed to his shoulders and forcing him to hunch under its weight, but the reminder of how little anybody cared for their plight droops the corners of his mouth for barely a second.

Theo tastes blood in his mouth, and belatedly registers that he’s torn through his lower lip. Like most of the words donated to him nowadays, they aren’t fashioned as weapons, but they still sting like venom when they lash over him. “That’s kind of why you were chosen,” he mumbles. Admittance feels like some kind of atonement. “Loners. Or, lots of friends but no real close ones. Families that didn’t really care.”

“The less dead,” Corey muses. “It’s something people say in true crime,” he explains at Theo’s questioning glance, “people that don’t get the recognition for their murders or missing cases because they’re seen as lesser human beings. Usually sex workers, travellers, minorities, addicts.”

Minorities were a particular favourite of the Doctors, Theo remembers that. He always took notice; he’s white-passing, but his mother was Native American, and somewhere along the way he started a tally of their victims’ ethnicities. He wonders now if that was intentional, or if their seventeenth century attitudes simply hadn’t evolved. He doubts it was the latter; everything they did was coldly calculated, hence why his actions so often are too. He wasn’t old enough to be privy to a lot of the details in the earlier days, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they preyed on the less dead for easy test subjects.

“It sucks,” Theo offers, “that nobody else knows.” It’s pathetic, but it’s something, and it’s the best he can do to encompass the magnitude of his feelings. “They should have people know. People should remember them.” For what they were. For what they could have been.

“We remember them,” Corey assents quietly. “I come up here every couple of weeks. I think they’d like it if you came up, too. If you’re comfortable with that.”

_ My comfort doesn’t matter _ , he wants to scream, but instead he says quietly, “I will.” The idea of visiting them brings him as much comfort as would deep throating a cactus, but reparations aren’t reimbursed in pleasantries. “I, uh. I never forgot them, either.”

Corey smiles like the sun. “I know,” he says simply. They fall into silence as their paths cross with a cluster of elderly hikers, most of whom give them suspicious glowers as they march past with walking sticks and clomping boots. What mischief they’re assuming two teenage boys are up to in a nature preserve on a Saturday morning is beyond Theo, but he does unintentionally give off the demeanour of a hooligan most of the time.

“I never said,” Corey says, when the two of them have finished dancing their way through the group, “the flamethrower thing? We had no idea that Josh had a flamethrower. Me and Tracey were doing homework when he walked in with it, said ‘watch out, you guys might want to get the anti-fire spray', and then immediately set fire to the bench.”

It takes Theo a minute to discern what ‘anti-fire spray’ means. “A fire extinguisher? He was such a dumbass.” The words blurt out of his mouth before he can wrangle it into submission, but Corey just cackles. Not a pissed-off, evil, vengeful cackle either; it’s benevolent and warm and makes Theo feel like they’re sharing an inside joke. Oh shit, they are. Someone get a camera.

“He really was,” Corey agrees gleefully. Probably over the moon to be able to talk about his friends finally. The pack are – well, they are what they are, and what they are is a lot of things, and one of those things is bad at talking about past mistakes, so Theo doubts Corey ever gets to even mention the other chimeras. “Heart of gold, but...he could be so stupid, and that’s coming from me. One time he said he couldn’t remember what the English word for cheese was, only the Spanish.”

“He said ‘cheese’? Not ‘queso’?” He shouldn’t judge. He’s not bilingual, he’s got no idea what it’s like to have two languages in the boxing ring of his brain at any given time. The closest he’s ever come is when Liam does something stupendously stupid and he’s rendered momentarily speechless in response. That happens at an alarming rate.

“He said, quote, ‘Hey, what’s the English word for cheese? My brain’s stuck in Spanish right now.’ And then I stared at him, and he asked why I wasn’t answering, and I said, ‘You just used it,” and he said, ‘No, cheese is Spanish. I need the English.’”

Live and learn. Laughing about good times aches when you have the parasites of bad memories clinging to them. New Theo appreciates that  urticating undercurrent. It signifies that he hasn’t forgotten what Old Theo was  like, and makes him remember everything that New Theo is trying to be.

* * *

There’s only one heartbeat thudding from the house by the time they return, and even if the two cars missing from the driveway didn’t indicate that Liam’s parents had left –  Dr. Geyer to the hospital for his weekend shift, Mrs Geyer to volunteer her skills as a counsellor at the local youth centre – Theo would have been able to pick it out as the beta’s in a second. He can even tell what state Liam’s in – awake about an hour ago, probably, but only out of bed within the past fifteen minutes, and still adorably bed-headed, eyes fuzzy with sleep.

Corey declines an offer to come in, citing a date with Mason in town that he needs to set off for, but he pulls Theo into a rapid and unanticipated hug before he goes, beaming with so much gratitude that Theo thinks his bones begin to liquify.

The mingled scent of strong coffee and Liam wafts out from the house as Theo approaches, almost strong enough to see in the air like a cartoon. His eyes would near constantly have hearts for pupils if that were the case, overcome as he is by his adoration for Liam. Gross.

Liam is perched on a stool at the kitchen island when Theo swings the door open, nursing a mug of presumably doctored coffee and staring blearily out of the window. He barely reacts at the sound of the hinges, an indication that Theo was right and he has only just woken up.

Hang on. “Corey!” Theo bellows, leaning back out of the doorframe. In his peripheral, Liam starts and spills the contents of his mugs over his hands, then goes to find a cloth while mumbling imaginative swears under his breath. “When were their birthdays?”

The chimera, halfway down the street, turns on his heel and walks backwards, grinning. “Josh was March the third,” he says at a normal volume, knowing Theo can hear him without having to disturb the entire block. “Tracey was December, the fourteenth.” He raises his arm in a wave and then shoves it back into his pocket, nodding politely to a middle-aged woman who looks scandalised by Theo’s rowdiness. She looks immediately placated, because who the fuck wouldn’t if Corey waved at them.

Theo hastens back into the house and closes the door before he can be glared at. He doesn’t want a repeat of last week, when Mrs Geyer informed them that their neighbours had complained about two teenage boys racing through the streets at midnight. Theo had very nearly said something about how they could burn off their energy in a very different way instead, but Liam had, with an expression of dawning horror, kicked him in the shin pointedly and apologised for both of them.

When Theo makes it to the kitchen, Liam is back at the kitchen island, the aftermath of his coffee tsunami cleared away. He still, quite clearly, has no idea what in the fuckery is going on, but he seems to have caught part of the conversation because his scent is soft around the edges with worry, and apprehension is weaved tightly into the seams. “Everything good?” he asks warily, nudging a cup of dark coffee towards him.

Theo accepts it gratefully, for what it is and as the invitation to talk. “Better than it’s been for a while,” he says meaningful. Liam blushes all the way to his ears and hides his face in his own mug. “I’ve been atoning for my sins.”

Liam frowns, not at him specifically. With his hair rumpled in all directions and his eyelids heavy with just-woke-up, he doesn’t look too far removed from a particularly adorable troll. Theo is struck with the urge to kiss him, and very admirably resists. “I hate that word,” he chides, which isn’t news to either of them because they’ve spent many a tense conversation tripping around the topic before. Liam, for all his belief and optimism in Theo now, couldn’t deny that what Old Theo had done was atrocious, to put it mildly, but had very vocally denounced the word ‘sin’ on the grounds that “you’re not even religious!” and “it’s such a harsh word, why can’t you just say transgressions instead?” Theo had said, “My sins, my word choice,” to which Liam had snapped his jaw shut with an audible click but wisely dropped the argument.

Theo isn’t really that eager to start it back up himself. He sidles up behind his boyfriend, nuzzles into the mass of hair that Liam refuses to cut (which Theo is secretly thrilled about), and kisses behind his ear. “Things are good.”

“Things are good,” Liam repeats, leaning against Theo, who is very tempted to step back and let Liam topple off the stool. Something in his brain – maybe common sense – tells him that he would ruin the moment, so he begrudgingly shuts off that thought, and just lets all of his senses become filled with Liam. 

**Author's Note:**

> also, just in case any of you didn’t know, Cody Christian is biracial!  
> his mother is Penobscot Native American (at least from what I’ve seen/heard, i’m not sure if Cody has ever confirmed specifically what tribe/band but i know he has confirmed his heritage) so i’ve incorporated that into this fic because it would have been cool if the show had worked it in too.  
> then again, he was spawn of the Devil at first, so maybe introducing a POC as a villain wouldn’t have been a great move. you're forgiven this one time but you're on thin ice teen wolf & general representation across mainstream TV


End file.
